I Can't Focus On Anything Since This Genocide Began | Yanis Varoufakis & Raoul Martinez

I've lost my capacity to focus on anything after the 7th of October because we are part of a genocide and we're complicit in it. We're not bystanders, we're not observers. Even those who are supporting Palestinians and are opposing genocide, we are complicit in genocide because, you know, it's not something that's happening out there. It is something that's happening out there with our bombs, with our fighter jets, with our money, with our moral support through our governments, through our own representatives. Hello, I'm here with Yanis Varoufakis and Raúl Martínez to talk about their new film in the eye of the storm, The Political Odyssey of Yanis Varoufakis. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having us. Great to be here. I feel like you guys are here to, you know, promote a buddy cop movie. We've got the loose cannon, we've got the by-the-book agent sent from headquarters. What made you want to make this film with Yanis about this period of time, the Eurozone crisis? For years, I'd been wanting to do a documentary on capitalism and economics generally. I just didn't quite know how to do it, what the best form would be. I'd seen how the language of economics had been weaponised to justify the unjustifiable, especially since the 2010s and with austerity and, you know. But not many people were joining the dots and seeing the underlying pattern. That, of course, is the logic of capitalism. It exploits labour, it exploits the planet. And I thought, OK, there is a space here for popularising an economics critique. And I kind of thought, OK, well, perhaps there's a way to hang this critique on a personal journey and have a narrator who has a gift for communication, has all the necessary expertise. And, of course, the story of Syriza and what happened in Greece itself just has this inherent drama to it. So, you know, Yannis was, for a director, a documentary director, he was a gift. We had, what, three to four hours a day in Athens in a dark room and he answered just... For a week. Yeah. Yeah, for a week. We pushed him hard, but he gave such fantastic interviews. And I started with the idea of just doing a single feature and it expanded into a six-part series just because what he managed to give was gold. Debt is to capitalism that which hell is to Christianity are pleasant and essential. We are in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The sacrifices of the Greek people will bring the country back to prosperity. The 2008 crisis was not one of the normal periodic downturns. It is the longest damage-inducing crisis in the history of capitalism. I could feel that the tsunami was coming. The result being the modern world that we live in. We were negotiating with financial terrorism, creditors who did not want their money back. Every asset of the Greek state was bundled together. This was a hidden bailout and we were collateral damage. They want our properties, they want our homeland. Austerity is another term for class war. Orchestrated attempt of economic aggression. It cannot be described in any other way. I could see Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, getting very agitated. He gets the floor. Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy. It became a massive battle to prevent the public ever from finding out. I've never listened to such an inaccurate report. This is what an oligarchy does when an oligarchy gets threatened. Like David and Goliath, they had to get rid of him. The landline rings. If you want your son to continue to return safely every night, you better lay off. And he mentioned a particular bank. We're being dragged into a lapidary. They had to find ways of violating their own rules. It is Wall Street who's our enemy. Our regulators became enablers. All you can talk about is fairy tales of economic growth. Anybody who does economic science is either a fool or is trying to fool you. We have seen an almost Newtonian revolution for the science of economics. It takes a small spark to ignite a revolutionary moment. Either we move beyond capitalism or we die. Going back to the financial crisis, I was 16 in 2008, so my entire adult life has been defined by the financial crisis and its many, many consequences. Why was there no back to normal? Why was there no recovery, as you might understand that word? Capitalism has a tendency to create a sine wave, as we say in trigonometry, right? Ups and downs and ups and downs. So periods of growth and then a crisis, and then redemption and, you know, recovery, and then another crisis. But every now and then, and in particular twice in its history, it went through a catastrophic collapse from which it never recovered its mojo as it was before. That was 1929. And unfortunately for you and your generation, 2008, your generations, our generations, 1929. When something, you know, it's like the big one, the big earthquake, which then even if you rebuild the city, it will not be like it was before. That's how I saw 2008. And unfortunately, unfortunately, because this is, these are the ways of history. Your generation has been condemned to never having the solace that your parent generation had. That even if they went through a bout of unemployment, a bout of bankruptcy, they lost their house, at least they could hope that within a reasonable frame of time, their kids, their grandkids, would have a better life than they did. That's no longer the case because capitalism, in my view, in 2008, met a crisis that effectively killed it in the same way that 1991 was the crisis that killed socialism and communism and social democracy, the great defeat of the left. 2008 was a great defeat of capitalism, but because we of the left were incapable of presenting your generation with a viable, credible alternative, the result is, remember what Rosa Luxemburg once said or asked, socialism or barbarism? Well, it's barbarism with the bankers acquiring power that they never had before. And now we have big tech, what I call cloud capital, which is creating a new kind of feudalism. But this is not even capitalism anymore. So I think that this is what your generation is experiencing and my generation, we are responsible for it. Because what your documentary is depicting is this huge fight between the political mechanisms of democracy and the entrenched interests of the financial sector as expressed through the Troika. Why, in the end, were the mechanisms of democracy not enough to overcome those entrenched interests? I'll start with you, Raoul, and then you. I think generally it's that we don't really live in truly democratic societies. This is what we're fighting for. It's not so much that democracy failed, we're still fighting for democracy. It's an unfinished historical project. Maybe, you know, we've made some gains, but we're not there yet. And part of the trick, of course, of having a voting system where essentially you have two choices, two main parties. That's one party away from a one-party state. And if those two parties essentially have the same worldview, they both support genocide. Let's say, as we're seeing right now, they both are in favour of privatising the NHS, of ecocidal policies, of perpetual growth on a finite planet. Well, that's not a very democratic system. That's really a trick, isn't it? It's a way to give the illusion of choice. Without offering any actual mechanism for change. So I think this is part of an ongoing project to create democratic mechanisms to actually affect change. They don't exist right now. Particularly now, we had the Corbyn moment where there was a small window. Again, post-2008, there's always going to be a window after a crisis. We failed, but we came close. We came close. And so I think now it's about really understanding where we went wrong and really preparing for that next window of opportunity. When Syriza came to power, were you optimistic about the potential of democratic political means to take on capitalism? Or did you know that this was a fight that you might lose? The latter. But that is to be an optimist. Even if there was only a 20% chance we would win. That was a great chance. Because today we have none. Here in Britain, in Greece. In the United States, none. We have 0.002. Then we have 20%. That was a good time to be alive. Look, there is the concept of democracy. And then there is the reality of what's called liberal democracy or democratic capitalism. Democratic capitalism is all about usurping the language of democracy to deny the practice of democracy. If you go back to the authors of the American Constitution, which was the first constitution effectively to cement the notion of liberal democracy. If you read the Federalist Papers, they are quite explicit. The whole point is to prevent the demos from being in power. To have a representative system, effectively to have an oligarchy with frequent elections that legitimize the authority of the oligarchs and the lack of democracy. So whenever we came closer to democracy, it was because the trade unions movement, progressive parties like the Labour Party a long time ago, under the all-determining threat of communism and of the Soviet Union, pushed the bourgeoisie towards making concessions like the National Health Service, like free education, like labour protections and so on. These were only given because the bourgeoisie was panicking that communism was coming and that they would lose the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. So quite naturally, when we of the left either surrendered like the Labour Party did here or failed and lost, when the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its hubris and its authoritarianism and the gulag, everything that was conceded to the many by the very few was taken back. This is why we had privatization, this is why we had the reprivatization of the National Health Service from within, fees for universities and the whole cabal of Thatcherism and Reaganism and neoliberalism and financialization and so on. So to cut a long story short, the reason why democracy or the democratic movements have failed and have shrunk and diminished in authority, the blame needs to fall squarely on the left, on us, because we stopped putting the pressure and the fear of the divinity and of the people to be precise, in the minds and the hearts of the bourgeoisie. Okay, so can I ask you this, because in recent months I've been going back to some of the classics, I've been reading What Is To Be Done, I've been reading the Satan Revolution because it sort of seemed to me that there was something missing from the strategy that we all tried to go for, 2015, 2019. Has the electoral strategy of the left run out of road? And should we be looking to other ways to build class power, to organize and to look to confrontations with the state rather than trying to take it over through democratic means? No, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, look, the left-leaning movements always answered in the affirmative your question by saying you need to have movements in the factories, in the offices, in the warehouses, in the schools, in the communities, cultural hegemony, Gramsci and so on, while at the same time trying to maximize your vote. That's not new, all right? And I agree with that entirely, but that's no longer enough. Some time ago I was asking myself the same question that you asked yourself, and I decided I'm going to write a political science fiction novel called Another Now because I wanted to answer the question, what could they have done differently after 2008? And I think that one great failure of the left was to stay within the limits of the nation-state and not to utilize the technological instruments that the opposition, that the establishment created. So for instance, let me give you an example of how I envisage the struggle. Yes, organized nurses, organized workers, organized students, and so on and so forth, right? And yes, canvass, trying to create a political party, and this is what we've done in Greece, not with great success, but with some success, in order to have a genuine alternative, not Keir Starmer's pathetic Labour Party. But at the same time, imagine if, and I've met quite a few of these people, they exist, they're not a figment of my imagination. If financial engineers working in the city of London or Wall Street, progressive ones who know what goes on in there, they have seen the crimes being perpetrated, they were part of it. A lot of those people, especially after 2008, they got really disillusioned. Imagine if we had brought them on board, I did just one example. Take a waterboard, a privatized waterboard somewhere in Yorkshire or some East, here in London, which now is owned by private equity, it has been overrated with debt, those debts have been divvied up in the form of dividends for those shadowy people and companies and shell companies that own the waterboard. Imagine if we organized a payment strike amongst the people who suffer really bad services, especially when it comes to sewage and so on, dirty rivers and polluted seas and lakes and so on. Imagine if we were to say, okay, look, we've worked out that the CDO which contains the shares of that company is going to be at a very precarious point in March 2024, let's say, right? You can work this out if you're a financial engineer. So from February to March, we organized a payment strike. Nobody pays their bills for three weeks, five weeks, right? And we crowdsource internationally money to help you pay your penalty, because what is the penalty going to be for not having paid your water bill for three weeks, right? The announcement that you're doing that immediately is going to cause the CDO that contains those shares to collapse. Imagine if we had a rolling payment strike like that across the world, in India, in Malaysia and so on, hitting private equity where it hurts internationally. Imagine if we had a site which was a transnational financial engineering-based action site. Well, we saw an example of this with the Don't Pay campaign. Just a couple of years ago, there was a big effort to get people to commit not to pay their energy bills. And while that didn't damage the energy companies per se, it did force the government to step in and underwrite people's energy bills, which you could interpret as another way of shifting a crisis of privatisation onto the public purse. Is there a risk that you don't hurt the private interest? No, there's no risk, if you do it properly. You see, that was a blunt instrument. I'm talking about surgical strikes, payment strikes, you know, three weeks here, three weeks there. I think we were three weeks somewhere else. We crowdsourced, combining it with strikes of the public, of the privatised, formerly public utility personnel, who are asking for their own terms and conditions to improve. And you do it in such a way as to hit their share values, and particularly the derivatives, which include those shares. But for that, you need financial engineers, if this is not just something that trade unions can do, or community organisers. The Progressive International, which I'm part of, and which some of us have worked very hard to put together since 2008, we started with Bernie Sanders. Now we have affiliated members of 200 million people around the world. We are trying that now. On Black Friday, every Black Friday, we have the so-called campaign, which you may have heard of, as hashtag Make Amazon Pay. So this is a rolling strike that begins in Vietnam, on Black Friday, because it's in the East, and it's where the day begins, right? And then it goes to Bangladesh, goes to India, goes to Germany, goes to New Jersey, and finishes off at Seattle, where the headquarters are. That has been doing reasonably well. But if we organise simultaneously, don't visit Amazon.com for that one day. That is going to have a serious impact on the share value of Amazon.com. I'm fascinated by the fact that trade unions ever came into existence, because the sacrifice people had to make in the 19th century, but even today, Amazon workers, think of Chris Smalls in Staten Island, New Jersey. I mean, they had to be vilified, not be able to put food on the table sometime in the 19th century, and early in the 20th century, people were murdered if they participated in trade unions. So collective action comes at a gigantic personal cost, with very little expected personal gain. So it's an act of sacrifice to be a trade unionist, to be an organiser of collective action. But with these technologies and financial engineering, we can reverse that. I mean, it doesn't cost you anything to not pay your bill for two weeks, or not to visit Amazon.com for a few days. It doesn't cost you anything. It's miniscule personal sacrifice, maximum collective benefit, and personal benefit, if it works. So that's what we need to do. We need to continue doing what it is that we should always have done, organise nurses, autoworkers, and so on. Canvas, door-to-door, and also utilise big tech and financial engineering. There are people working for big tech as we speak, and there are people who are working for Wall Street or the City of London, whom we could have recruited if we had a plan. I want to talk a little bit about current affairs. Right now, the Israeli army is preparing for an assault on Rafa. There have been over 12,000 children killed in Gaza, and hundreds of journalists, photojournalists, filmmakers. I guess I want to ask you this, Raoul. As a documentary filmmaker, do you feel that the industry that you're a part of has been responding to that huge loss of life amongst journalists in Gaza with the kind of outrage that they ought to be? Absolutely not. No, I mean, I have various hats. I make films. I write books. I'm an artist. I paint. But when I look at the general response in this country, in Germany, in France, in the US and elsewhere, it's deeply depressing, deeply shocking. I wouldn't have predicted the level of callousness, whether it be expressed through silence or vocal support for what's happening in Gaza. It's truly sobering, and I think it's forced all of us to really reassess where we are culturally and politically and what kind of battles need fighting. It seems like such a regression back to the kind of cycles of violence, imperialism, colonialism, which, you know, hopefully we will know about it in our history, the British Empire, etc., etc. But no, we need to be doing so much more. And it's happening right now. It hasn't finished. It's going to happen tomorrow. There are people dying every single moment. And we have a right we have a duty as journalists, as anyone with a platform, a platform or a skill or a talent, any way to kind of express and communicate, even if it be on your Facebook page or TikTok or Twitter, to keep this alive and to just keep coming back to the basic foundational problem of dehumanization. It's always a disaster. It's never right. Whether your media is rationalizing it, whether your government is telling you it's OK. No, this is a huge moral test for each one of us. So many people have failed. But I've also been deeply inspired by the exceptions, people who have taken a risk. Yanis is one of them. There are many others. And that's where hope lies. And those are the examples we need to follow. But we should really be clear there is a cost. People have paid a cost. But that's always been the case in politics. Dissidents are punished because they truly do threaten those with established power. But to answer your question, no, not enough has been done and it's shameful and needs to be so much more. Is there any form of Palestinian resistance which would be acceptable to the establishment politicians and institutions of the West? No. No, because let's face it, the anti-Semites were the first to have embraced Zionism because they wanted to get rid of the Jews from Europe. They wanted them to go somewhere else. And those same anti-Semites happened to be white supremacists. When the British went to Australia or Kenya or South Africa, they declared the land to be terra nullius, to be an empty land. Why? Because, you know, once you declare Australia to be empty of the five million, five and a half million aborigines that live there, then immediately you have license to kill them, license to genocide. So it's something they had done. They had practiced it. They were good at it. They believed in it. Winston Churchill famously supported genocide and practiced it. And so then, you know, when the Zionist idea, a land without a people for a people without a land. So what's this? This is exactly terra nullius, like saying Palestine is a land without a people. And what about the people who live there? Well, they can't be humans. That's the beginning of dehumanization. That's the license to kill Palestinians. The Balfour Declaration was exactly that. The idea that Israel has the right from the river to the sea to establish Israeli sovereignty of a Jewish state. In other words, Jews have the right to be there. Non-Jews don't have the right to be there. That's genocide. So the West is absolutely complicit. I have to tell you that, you know, I've lost my capacity to focus on anything after the 7th of October because we are part of a genocide and we're complicit in it. We're not bystanders. We're not observers. Even those who are supporting Palestinians and are opposing genocide, we are complicit in genocide because, you know, it's not something that's happening out there. It is something that's happening out there with our bombs, with our fighter jets, with our money, with our moral support through our governments, through our own representatives. On the 7th of October I happened to be in Berlin accidentally and I was being interviewed that day when everything, all hell broke loose, literally. And instinctively, I wasn't planning this because I didn't know it had happened until the journalists put it to me. It was breaking news at the time. And I said, listen, I'm certainly not going to condemn Hamas. I'm not even condemning Netanyahu. And I'm not even condemning the Israeli settlers. I'm condemning us Europeans because for centuries we perpetrated pogroms against the Jews. We hounded the Jews, not just in Germany or Britain, but we the Greeks, the Serbs, the Croats, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, you know, we have all been participating in what led eventually to the Holocaust. And the Holocaust was not just a German Nazi thing, it was a Greek Nazi thing, it was a French Nazi thing, a Croat Nazi thing, right? And then what, how did we absolve ourselves by giving license to the apartheid state of Israel to kill as many Palestinians as they deemed necessary and to dehumanize them and talk about them as... So my question to my German comrades and, you know, my party in Germany, because Mela 25 exists in Germany as well, we tried to contest the European Parliament election this coming June as part of the DiEM25 umbrella. We lost some comrades. We said, oh, you can't, you can't compare and contrast. We're not comparing and contrasting anything. We're saying that there's a genocide happening. The Holocaust was a unique kind of evil. Nothing like what's going on now in Palestine, because that was an attempt by the Nazis to kill every Jew there was in the world, right? I mean, Israeli army would stop killing them if they all left Palestine. But that doesn't stop it from being genocide. And my question to my German comrades is, you know, how much Palestinian blood needs to flow before you feel that your guilt over the Holocaust has been expunged? How do people react when you put that question to them? In silence. But without the courage which is necessary to stand up for Israeli-Jewish comrades in Berlin who are demonstrating against the IDF, against the genocide of the Palestinians. So, you know, I'll just mention Iris Heppertz, a great friend and comrade of ours. She's an Israeli-Jewish psychoanalyst who lives and works in Berlin. And she went out onto the street with a placard, I don't know whether you heard that story, in which she had written as an Israeli and as a Jew, stop the massacre in Gaza. Didn't even use the word genocide. She was arrested for being anti-Semitic by a white Aryan German policeman. This Israeli-Jewish woman was arrested for anti-Semitism. You can't make this up. I mean, I've got one last question and it's about how do you stop your attention from being split? Because I can't think of anything apart from Gaza at the moment. At the same time, I know that we have passed certain climate tipping points. We are on course for a future with huge amounts of displacement of people because of the climate crisis, huge amounts of food instability. Looking at the erosion of democratic norms, civil liberties, looking at greater power concentrated in financial sectors, looking at the rise of the far right, how do people focus their political energies on all these crises calling for their attention? There's an easy answer to your question by synthesising and understanding it's one crisis. It's one crisis to begin with. Think of COP28. It's that immense cop-out, right? Who was heading it? The head of an Emirati oil company. Think of one of the reasons why Hamas did what they did on the surface of October because the United Arab Emirates had already struck a deal with Israel condoning the apartheid state and the slow genocide of the Palestinian people. Think of the way in which the land and the water table in Gaza is poisoned, toxified. Did you hear anybody from the Green Party in Germany saying, hang on a second, even if they don't care about the Palestinians, care about the soil. You're a Green Party. You're an ecological party. Say something. Oh, not a word. So it's one crisis. That is how I deal with it. I deal with it as a single crisis of exploiting humans and planet and nature, of essentially bowing to the interests of the very, very few who are the imperialists, who are the fossil fuel subsidisers or exploiters, and who are the ones who really dare create a Berlin Wall between people and power. How do you deal with all of the crises calling for your attention? Easy question. Personally, I think it helps just to find something you can do. Making this series, which covers Yanis's journey, but also his thought. I mean, it goes from the micro to the macro, the personal to the political. It does try to grapple with these huge issues of the metacrisis, I think, or a polycrisis, whatever you want to call it. But I think it's really important to keep asking whatever we're working on, to keep asking of ourselves and each other to go deeper with their analysis. And I think that's partly what Yanis is trying to get at, to kind of see the common causes, the roots, not just the symptoms, but the deeper disease. And I don't think that's obvious. And I don't think all the left is necessarily there. I think it's an ongoing project that we're all participating in. Yes, it's understanding the logic of capitalism, but it's also deeper than that. I like to go beyond the blame game and to realize that whether it's Netanyahu, Starmar, Biden, anyone, I think they're quite despicable human beings. But had I been born with their genes in their family and lived their life, I'd be doing what they're doing. So the deeper issues, the deeper problem is not this bad person or cynical person or evil person. No, it's the culture and the systems which are creating these people and elevating them into positions of power. A baby can be raised to become a Buddha, a Christ, or a Hitler or any other tyrant you want to mention. So it's not the biology that's the problem. It's the culture. And if there's, when we look at the kind of the terrain of future possibility for our species, it doesn't look good. I think there's a very narrow path, not to get to some utopia, but simply to survive. Most of that terrain is taken up by self-determination as a species, I think, because we have exponential increase of technological power. But that isn't being matched by an increase in wisdom, an increase in the social structure of capacity to make wise, sensible, rational decisions. No, we're basically at a baseline of being quite idiotic as a species. We're getting more and more powerful. That's not going to end well. So the only way out is to change the causality. There's a fantastic anthropologist called Marvin Harris, and he had a great way of kind of breaking down a society into three layers. He talked about infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure. And what we're seeing, I think, is the technological drivers of civilization are rapidly accelerating. They're the tail wagging the dog. So we have exponential growth in tech and power, and that is defining what the social structure looks like, which is governance and the economy and law and all that. And that is defining our values, our beliefs, which is the superstructure, the way we see the world. We need to change that causality. We need a cultural enlightenment, which I think can be framed as correcting what might be called a spiritual crisis, integrating politics with spirituality, spirituality with politics, closing all the gaps that exist between these parts of society. And using those values, using the cultural enlightenment to restructure the social structure and then bind the power of the infrastructure. Because if we don't bind that power, if we don't find the wisdom, the collective sense-making and decision-making to bind and control that power, the things do not look good. So nice and simple then. You just have to bind the power of infrastructure, you need a cultural enlightenment, and you need to be able to reform the social structure. Nice and easy. I think I can do that in an afternoon. Easy answer. Nice. And how can people watch this film? Thank you for asking. Well, it's available right now. If you go to eyeofthestorm.info, you can buy it directly from there. And in a few weeks, it will be available on Amazon and the rest. But we thought before we give Jeff Bezos his 40% cut, we're releasing it independently. Oh, Yanis, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you very much. And keep doing what you're doing at Novara Media. Support Novara Media and all the independent media.